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Neanderthals and human lived side by side in Middle Eastern caves and even interbred
Daily Mail (UK) ^ | 9-29-2012

Posted on 09/30/2012 5:19:02 AM PDT by Renfield

Neanderthals may have lived side by side with early humans and possibly interbred with them, according to new research.

Stone axes and sharp flint arrowheads of both branches of the human race have been discovered in limestone caves in northern Israel.

The findings, reported in the Times, have led archeologists to believe the two sub-species found harmony in a coastal mountain range that today is in a state of war with its neighbours...

(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...


TOPICS: History; Science
KEYWORDS: cave; caves; godsgravesglyphs; helixmakemineadouble; neandertal; neandertals; neanderthal; neanderthals; paleoanthropology; spelunkers; spelunking
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To: null and void
Scientists do their best to assign accurate genus and species names to extinct beings, but 100% certainty isn't always possible. There are several types of hominids who are classified as part of the genus Homo (and therefore could be considered "human" since that adjective comes from the Latin word homo) and there is disagreement about how many species are represented among the fossils found to date. And there could be future discoveries that will force changes in the family tree.

If evolution occurred in the way biologists think, then one species developed out of another--so the boundaries between species are sometimes fuzzy. Dogs are regarded as a separate species but they can interbreed with wolves.

81 posted on 10/01/2012 9:34:02 AM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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To: Verginius Rufus

Yep. The question is deeper than nomenclature.

Could H. Neanderthalensis mate with H. Sapiens and produce viable and fertile offspring?

Given that there are varying degrees Neanderthal DNA in some human populations, I’d say yes, as repugnant as the thought may be, interbreeding was possible.


82 posted on 10/01/2012 9:41:32 AM PDT by null and void (Day 1350 of our ObamaVacation from reality - Obama, a queer and present danger)
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To: null and void

Been a long long time since I read that. Maybe they went back for another spin? Scots gotta come from somewhere.

(I only do this to annoy Sunken Civ since I’ve got Scot forebears too)


83 posted on 10/01/2012 10:04:54 AM PDT by wildbill (You're just jealous because the Voices talk oMnly to me.)
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To: SunkenCiv

http://www.johnspeedie.com/healy/idid.wav


84 posted on 10/01/2012 10:38:36 AM PDT by BenLurkin (This is not a statement of fact. It is either opinion or satire; or both)
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To: null and void

Why would it be repugnant? Maybe some of the Neanderthals were fine people. Who is to say that one of them could not have learned to do a Sudoku puzzle as well as anyone alive today? Or become a chess master? Certainly none of them was as evil as some members of our species (Stalin, Hitler, Che Guevara, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein).


85 posted on 10/01/2012 11:09:44 AM PDT by Verginius Rufus
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To: null and void

Varmintman is NOT a liar.

He firmly believes what he says and posts.

He could still be wrong, but he is decidedly not lying.


Like i said i can not call him a liar because i do not know what point he is making, i also can not agree or disagree for the same reason.


86 posted on 10/01/2012 11:32:16 AM PDT by ravenwolf
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To: Verginius Rufus

I’m not saying that Pat Nixon was a Neanderthal, mind you.


I hope you are not saying that, it would just about make my day.


87 posted on 10/01/2012 11:44:24 AM PDT by ravenwolf
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To: SunkenCiv

Yo momma is so ugly that . . . she’s a Neanderthal!


88 posted on 10/01/2012 2:30:16 PM PDT by colorado tanker
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To: null and void; varmintman; ravenwolf
null and void: “varmintman is NOT a liar.
He firmly believes what he says and posts.”

Of course he is, BECAUSE every time he posts his ludicrous nonsense he is corrected and instructed in the truth of the matter.
So varmintman well knows the truth, and yet continues to post utter rubbish, beginning with his very first claim — that Neanderthal DNA is “half way between human and chimpanzee”.

In fact, the number of DNA mutations separating humans from Neanderthals is orders of magnitude less than the number separating humans from chimps.

And the list of varmintman’s errors goes on and on — most of which he has been repeatedly corrected on.
And yet he refuses to learn or post the truth.

That makes him a... what?

89 posted on 10/02/2012 8:28:31 AM PDT by BroJoeK (a little historical perspective....)
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To: BroJoeK

Stubborn Dutch?


90 posted on 10/02/2012 8:34:39 AM PDT by null and void (Day 1351 of our ObamaVacation from reality - Obama, a queer and present danger)
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To: BroJoeK; null and void; ravenwolf
o varmintman well knows the truth, and yet continues to post utter rubbish, beginning with his very first claim — that Neanderthal DNA is “half way between human and chimpanzee”.

Calling that one a lie makes YOU a liar:

http://www.expressindia.com/fe/daily/19970712/19355423.html

He said his team ran four separate tests for authenticity - checking whether other amino acids had survived, making sure the DNA sequences they found did not exist in modern humans, making sure the DNA could be replicated in their own lab and then getting other labs to duplicate their results. Comparisons with the DNA of modern humans and of apes showed the Neanderthal was about halfway between a modern human and a chimpanzee.

http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/troufs/anth1602/video/On_Trial.html

Timeline: 1997 isolated Neandertal DNA Neandertals are almost exactly halfway between the chimpanzee and modern humans

91 posted on 10/02/2012 9:34:24 AM PDT by varmintman
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To: All
http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.0020057

The retrieval of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from four Neandertal fossils from Germany, Russia, and Croatia has demonstrated that these individuals carried closely related mtDNAs that are not found among current humans.....

92 posted on 10/02/2012 9:54:04 AM PDT by varmintman
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To: BroJoeK

Of course he is, BECAUSE every time he posts his ludicrous nonsense he is corrected and instructed in the truth of the matter.


I don,t know enough about this dna stuff to even discuss it but the way varmintman talks the Neanderthals would have to have been here between six and seven thousand years ago.

Or else the ones they call the Neanderthals were actually human and nothing else.

I do not trust environmentalists and i do not trust the evolution scientist who are trying to prove there is no God, if they don,t have one that is fine.


93 posted on 10/02/2012 3:25:59 PM PDT by ravenwolf
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To: varmintman; null and void; ravenwolf
varmintman: "Calling that one a lie makes YOU a liar:"

Your sources from 1996 are way, way out of date.
So, how many times do you have to see the truth before you stop misrepresenting it?

In short, genetic diversity among humans is 10 million to 30 million DNA mutations.

In other words, the genetic difference between humans and neanderthals is about .3% or circa 10 million DNA mutations.
That means there is more genetic diversity among humans than between humans and Neanderthals.

Contrast the genetic differences between humans and chimpanzees at 94% = 192 million DNA mutations or 19 times the differences between humans and Neanderthals.

So, on a scale of one to twenty, where chimpanzees are 20 and humans one, Neanderthals are about 1.5 at most.

Furthermore, the 1% to 4% of Neanderthal DNA in some humans tells us that either they interbred before Neanderthals' extinction, or share a more recent common ancestor than previously supposed.

94 posted on 10/02/2012 4:32:13 PM PDT by BroJoeK (a little historical perspective....)
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To: ravenwolf
ravenwolf: "I don,t know enough about this dna stuff to even discuss it but the way varmintman talks the Neanderthals would have to have been here between six and seven thousand years ago."

We don't know when the last Neanderthals died, but the most recent possible bones are dated around 24,000 years old.
This was after some 20,000 years of human-Neanderthal coexistence in Europe.

No one knows exactly what killed the Neanderthals, and many ideas have been proposed, but there is no physical evidence on Neanderthals more recent than 24,000 years ago.

ravenwolf: "Or else the ones they call the Neanderthals were actually human and nothing else."

Please remember that scientific words like "species" "sub-species" "genus", etc., are all matters of definition, and that there is really no hard and fast line separating them.
By scientific definition we say that two "sub-species" have become separate "species" when they no longer successfully interbreed in the wild, but even such a simple definition has exceptions.
For example, by any reasonable classification, polar bears and brown bears are clearly separate species, and yet they do occasionally interbreed in the wild.

And that may even serve as a model to explain human & Neanderthal interactions.

ravenwolf: "I do not trust environmentalists and i do not trust the evolution scientist who are trying to prove there is no God, if they don,t have one that is fine."

No real scientist ever attempts to "prove" there is no God, because by definition it cannot be done scientifically.
So whoever says such things is not speaking scientifically, but rather philosophically, or religiously.

Yes, everyone is entitled to their opinion, and everyone has one, but opinions about God are not scientific and anyone who claims they are is not speaking truthfully.
So you can ignore them, FRiend.

95 posted on 10/02/2012 4:53:44 PM PDT by BroJoeK (a little historical perspective....)
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To: varmintman
The retrieval of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) sequences from four Neandertal fossils from Germany, Russia, and Croatia has demonstrated that these individuals carried closely related mtDNAs that are not found among current humans.....

Translation:

Neanderthal-human hybrids only survived (or were fertile) if the mating was was NeanderDaddy and HuMom.

Like I said.

Don't assume the mating

was mutually consensual..

96 posted on 10/02/2012 5:15:37 PM PDT by null and void (Day 1351 of our ObamaVacation from reality - Obama, a queer and present danger)
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To: BroJoeK

No one knows exactly what killed the Neanderthals, and many ideas have been proposed, but there is no physical evidence on Neanderthals more recent than 24,000 years ago.


That was also my point, most Christians believe in there being one creation, which started with Adam and Eve almost seven thousand years ago.

I believe the bible speaks of God making man on the sixth day as being the creation, it says these are the generations in which everything was created, not literal days but thousands of years.

It was after this that God made Adam and Eve.

So if the creation is the way it appears to me from reading about it in the Bible then it would have been possible for man and the Neanderthals to live at the same time, and it might even explain the missing link, but like i said i don,t put much stock in every thing that is called science.


97 posted on 10/02/2012 5:59:42 PM PDT by ravenwolf
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To: Verginius Rufus

Certainly none of them was as evil as some members of our species (Stalin, Hitler, Che Guevara, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein).


I find it hard to believe that we know anything at all about what they call the Neanderthals. so i don,t see how any one could make a statement like that.


98 posted on 10/02/2012 6:06:05 PM PDT by ravenwolf
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To: BroJoeK
Problems with your "analysis" include:

Aside from that, it is well known that the human race has so little genetic diversity as to require a "bottleneck" which standard theories put around 45K years ago and which Vendramini and others claim reduced the human population to a level so low that they temporarily disappeared from the fossil record, and that the difference between humans and Neanderthals is comparatively gigantic.

Again a Neanderthal footprint, and that item is real and not hypothetical:

Next time it rains, find some mud and see if you can figure a way to make a footprint like that. See if anybody in your family can make a footprint like that, anybody in your neighborhood, your town, your state.....

Can you really look at that and try to claim that there's more difference between you and me than there is between either of us and whoever made that footprint???

99 posted on 10/02/2012 6:11:52 PM PDT by varmintman
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To: Renfield; Verginius Rufus; Hiddigeigei; RipSawyer; ravenwolf; SunkenCiv; Dustbunny; ANGGAPO; ...
As I mentioned earlier, there is zero actual archaeological evidence on the planet of humans cross-breeding with Neanderthal, e.g.

http://discovermagazine.com/1995/sep/theneanderthalpe558/

Quote
Humans love to mate. They mate all the time, by night and by day, through all the phases of the female’s reproductive cycle. Given the opportunity, humans throughout the world will mate with any other human. The barriers between races and cultures, so cruelly evident in other respects, melt away when sex is at stake. Cortés began the systematic annihilation of the Aztec people--but that did not stop him from taking an Aztec princess for his wife. Blacks have been treated with contempt by whites in America since they were first forced into slavery, but some 20 percent of the genes in a typical African American are white. Consider James Cook’s voyages in the Pacific in the eighteenth century. Cook’s men would come to some distant land, and lining the shore were all these very bizarre-looking human beings with spears, long jaws, browridges, archeologist Clive Gamble of Southampton University in England told me. God, how odd it must have seemed to them. But that didn’t stop the Cook crew from making a lot of little Cooklets.

Project this universal human behavior back into the Middle Paleolithic. When Neanderthals and modern humans came into contact in the Levant, they would have interbred, no matter how strange they might initially have seemed to each other. If their cohabitation stretched over tens of thousands of years, the fossils should show a convergence through time toward a single morphological pattern, or at least some swapping of traits back and forth.

But the evidence just isn’t there, not if the TL and ESR dates are correct. Instead the Neanderthals stay staunchly themselves. In fact, according to some recent ESR dates, the least Neanderthalish among them is also the oldest. The full Neanderthal pattern is carved deep at the Kebara cave, around 60,000 years ago. The moderns, meanwhile, arrive very early at Qafzeh and Skhul and never lose their modern aspect. Certainly, it is possible that at any moment new fossils will be revealed that conclusively demonstrate the emergence of a Neandermod lineage. From the evidence in hand, however, the most likely conclusion is that Neanderthals and modern humans were not interbreeding in the Levant.


Shreve mentions that humans and Neanderthals may have occupied the Levant at different time periods (thus dealing with the lack of evidence of cross-breeding) but I believe that Vendramini's more recent study eliminates that possibility pretty thoroughly.

Next is the fact of the first modern humans appearing suddenly in the archaeological record:

 Vendramini ("Them and us") notes:

Quote
The speed of the Upper Palaeolithic revolution in the Levant was also breathtaking. Anthropologists Ofer Bar-Yosef and Bernard Vandermeersch:

Between 40,000 and 45,000 years ago the material culture of western Eurasia changed more than it had during the previous million years. This efflorescence of technological and artistic creativity signifies the emergence of the first culture that observers today would recognise as distinctly human, marked as it was by unceasing invention and variety. During that brief period of 5,000 or so years, the stone tool kit, unchanged in its essential form for ages, suddenly began to differentiate wildly from century to century and from region to region. Why it happened and why it happened when it did constitute two of the greatest outstanding problems in paleoanthropology.


Likewise Dwardu Cardona ("Flare Star"):

Quote
"Where and how the Cro Magnons first arose remains unknown.  Their appearance, however, coincided with the most bitter phase of the ice age.  There is, however, no doubt that they were more advanced, more sophisticated, than the Neanderthals with whom they shared the land.  Living in larger and more organized groups than had earlier humans, Cro Magnon peoples spread out until they populated most of the world.  Their tools, made of bone, stone, and even wood, were carved into harpoons, awls, and fish hooks.  They were presumably able hunters although, as with the Neanderthals, they would also have foraged to gather edible plants, roots, and wild vegetables.  The only problem here is that, as far as can be told, the Cro Magnons seem to have arrived on the scene without leaving a single trace of their evolutionary ancestors.  'When the first Cro Magnons arrived in Europe some 40,000 years ago', Ian Tattersall observed, 'they evidently brought with them more or less the entire panoply of behaviors that distinguishes modern humans from every other species that has ever existed.'"


We read a claim that we and the Neanderthal have a "common ancestor(TM)".  The Neanderthal has been abandoned as a plausible evolutionary antecedent for modern man precisely because the genetic gap is too large (DNA halfway between ours and that of a chimpanzee). Anything 300K - 500K years back which anybody could try to claim was a "common ancestor(TM)" to both us and the Neanderthal (Usually given as homo Heidelbergensis)", would be much more remote from us THAN the Neanderthal.  Too-genetically-remote-to-be-ancestral-to is a transitive relationship and the nature of such relationships doesn't require graduate level math;  you'd think the people making this particular claim would figure the problem out sooner or later but they don't seem to.

There is a new claim (Paabo and the Max Planck Institute) of 1 - 4% Neanderthal genes in everybody other than Africans.  That one is at odds with the undisputed knowledge of a recent severe population bottleneck (probably < 100 individuals on the planet) amongst modern humans.  As Vendramini's reconstructions show, the Neanderthal was a glorified ape.  Any crossbreeding with a glorified ape PRIOR to the bottleneck and Africans would not get left out.  Any crossing AFTER the bottleneck and not involving Africans as claimed, and the genetic gap between Africans and everyody else would be gigantic, rather than minuscule as it actually is.  Paabo and others making this claim need to go back to school for some sort of a basic logic course.

Not that the genetic evidence Paabo cites is fictitious mind you, just that it does not indicate actual cross breeding.  What it does indicate is the existence of a few low-level genetic components in different creatures.  Similarly, you'd find a few of the same low-level C language math functions in both banking software and rocket telemetry programs.  That does not mean that rocket control software is hacked from banking software.

Then there is the case of Wikipedia and the US Museum of Natural History:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neanderthal_anatomy

Wherein we observe a totally reconstructed skeleton with feet (bones at least) just like yours and mine courtesy of the US NatHist Museum and then a bit lower on the page from the Museum of Natural History in Prague, a real footprint which is very clearly that of an ape.  One guy in the talk section has tried to alert them to the fact that they have a problem, but it doen't seem to have taken.  Either the museum people really are that stupid, or they think we're that stupid.

Finally there is the problem of thinking that a Neanderthal male could/would rape a woman and, rather than cooking and eating her afterwards as usual, somehow or other keep her alive long enough to bear a cross-species child, raise that child to reproductive age, and have him/her breed back into human populations without anybody catching on.....

In real life:


Cro Magnons hated Neanderthals and other hominids enough to extirpate them root and branch from this planet.  There is zero way that they would have allowed any cross-breed to survive, even if such a cross-breed were possible which it clearly was not.  The basic, cold, hard reality is that no living human has any Neanderthal or other hominid blood in him/her whatsoever, or is descended from Neanderthals or any hominid in any way whatsoever.
100 posted on 10/02/2012 6:32:05 PM PDT by varmintman
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